Gaming, Simulation, and Collective Experience

Kaiho Yu approached gaming as a framework for examining how rules, participation, and artificial intelligence reshape space and collective experience.

On 14 May 2026, in Bangkok, Kaiho Yu presented a lecture titled Gaming as Gathering: Collective in Analog and Digital. Moving from street games and analogue rule systems to networked platforms and virtual worlds, the lecture examined how gaming participates in the formation of social relations, spatial orders, and shared imaginaries.

The lecture considered gaming beyond its conventional association with entertainment. Games establish rules that define the actions available to participants and organize competition, cooperation, negotiation, and collective decision-making. As players follow, interpret, or alter these rules, they continually redefine their relationships with one another. Gaming can therefore be understood as a social and spatial structure through which collective life is designed and organized.

From street games and tabletop systems to multiplayer platforms and virtual worlds, different forms of play establish distinct conditions of participation. Bodies, boundaries, and temporary rules in physical space are translated into interfaces, data, identities, and real-time interaction in digital environments. Game worlds are not isolated from reality. They reproduce existing social relations while providing experimental settings for new forms of collaboration and shared experience.

With the development of artificial intelligence, digital environments are moving from predetermined rules toward more adaptive and generative forms of simulation. Characters, situations, and spaces can respond continuously to participant behaviour. Designers no longer determine every possible outcome. Instead, they establish conditions through which events emerge from interactions between participants and computational systems.

Within this context, world-building, interactive media, and contemporary art become important fields for reconsidering space, agency, and collective experience. Through the lens of gaming and simulation, the lecture explored how relationships are formed across physical and digital environments, and how artificial intelligence may transform participation, co-creation, and future social imaginaries.

Lecturer: Kaiho Yu
Location: Bangkok Kunsthalle
Link: https://khaoyaiart.org/bk/activities/gaming-as-gathering-collective-in-analog/

Kaiho Yu, Natürlich Spielen, 2022, site-specific installation, Tenna, Switzerland

Kaiho Yu and Arsenios Zachariadis, Ephemeral Garden, 2019, proposal for the LACMA Art + Technology Lab

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